Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

NYTimes Dealbook: Insider Scheme Had Touches of James Bond

“Unlike the Galleon case, where senior officials at corporations passed tips on early earnings estimates to people at the fund, the Goffer case centers on allegations that may sound more familiar to students of the insider trading scandals of 25 years ago — early tips about deals from the people involved in doing them. According to the criminal complaints, Mr. Cutillo passed the information along through a friend, Jason C. Goldfarb, 31, who specialized in workers compensation law at a private firm in Brooklyn and who was also arrested on Thursday.”

Computerworld: Data quality vendors missing the mark, study finds

“One-fifth of respondents felt data quality is a prerequisite to an MDM initiative and wanted to see more vendor offerings integrating those two areas. Hayler says one would expect vendor partnerships between the areas of data quality and MDM, and that is precisely what is currently happening in the industry.”

docinthemachine: Encrypt EHR — Else HIPAA Violations Need Be Reported To Government & Media

“For example, if a physician maintains patient information in a laptop computer containing the unsecured information of more than 500 patients and the laptop is stolen, the physician would be required to notify not only the patients affected by the breach, but would likely need to also notify the DHHS and the media. A medical practice need not report a breach if the patient information has been properly encrypted – because information that is encrypted is not considered ‘unsecure.’”

Initiate Blog: The Brittle Nature of Data Warehouses

“Usually, only a small percentage of the data are ever used. So why bother? The TCO for extracting, copying, converting, transferring, transforming, integrating, propagating, backing-up, loading, and verifying the data skyrockets far beyond its value and injects significant risk and brittleness into the entire ecosystem.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Come by and see us at TDWI World in Orlando Nov. 3 & 4, Booth 405

The Emculturated World: Unmanage Master Data Management

“MDM breaks down in the moment it becomes divorced from a practical, immediate attempt to capture just what is needed today. The moment it attempts to “bank” standard symbols ahead of their usage, the MDM process becomes speculative, and proscriptive.”

Governing: Can I Say No to an Electronic Health Record?

“In some instances, patients don’t even know their information is being shared. For example, if consumers turn over prescription drug records when applying for life insurance, the insurer will sometimes hand off the information to business partners who then hand it off to data miners. To keep a tighter grip on privacy, Deven McGraw, director of health privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, would like a set of rules that all organizations in the health IT world would have to follow.”

Related post: “Applying Identity Resolution to Patient Identification Integrity”

San Antonio Express-News: McManus recalls 9-11 at GEOINT summit

“Bart Johnson, acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis with the Homeland Security Department, said cooperation is improving, although problems remain with security clearances and interdepartmental connectivity. ‘The federal government can only do so much in getting it down to the street level,’ Johnson said. Homeland security and Justice Department officials have formed 72 “fusion centers” — terrorism prevention and response centers where federal agencies work with the military, local law enforcement and private partners. Three are in Texas: Austin, Dallas and Collin County near Dallas.”

information management: From Search to Explore

“It’s no surprise that people are looking at more and more internal and external resources for informed decision-making. In the internal case, data integration is a foundation of master data management as well. But integration for BI to common visual tools is increasingly taking place in subsystems, relational databases and cubes, and the visualization layer itself.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Come by and see us at TDWI World in Orlando Nov. 3 & 4!

Forbes.com: Who Is In Charge Of Your Data?

[Dan Woods] “But in most companies, no single person is charged with the task of making sure that the right data is being captured in an efficient way that ensures data quality. The Data Warehousing Institute estimated the annual cost of poor data quality at $600 billion in 2002. Other studies have produced similar estimates.”

Austin American Statesman: Clerk accused of absconding with lottery cash

“So when the 25-year-old quit his job at the convenience store and claimed a $1 million lottery jackpot in Austin, Joshi’s co-workers were suspicious and told investigators, the affidavit said. Those investigators now believe that in May, after a regular customer brought in his lottery tickets and asked Joshi to check if they were winners, Joshi kept the winning ticket, did not tell the customer and claimed the prize for himself, according to the affidavit and Travis County Assistant District Attorney Patty Robertson.”

Hartford Business: State Recommits To Fighting Shadow Labor

“The state board charged with cracking down on employers who fail to pay employee taxes and workers’ compensation premiums will meet on Nov. 5, following a 10-month hiatus.”

cnet news: Gartner: Brace yourself for cloud computing

“Cloud computing takes several forms, from the nuts and bolts of Amazon Web Services to the more finished foundation of Google App Engine to the full-on application of Salesforce.com. Companies should figure out what if any of those approaches are most suited to their challenges, Gartner said.”

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By Gary Seeger, Infoglide Vice President

An intriguing post by Nate Anderson on Ars Technica highlights a difficult reality about today’s easy availability of vast quantities of “anonymized” data. Quoting from a recent paper by Paul Ohm at the University of Colorado Law School, Anderson writes that “as Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: ‘data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.’”

A seminal study published in 2000 by Latanya Sweeney at Carnegie Mellon opened the issue by proving that a simple combination of a very small number of publicly available attributes can uniquely identify individuals:

“It was found that 87% (216 million of 248 million) of the population in the United States had reported characteristics that likely made them unique based only on {5-digit ZIP, gender, date of birth}. About half of the U.S. population (132 million of 248 million or 53%) are likely to be uniquely identified by only {place, gender, date of birth}, where place is basically the city, town, or municipality in which the person resides… In general, few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person.”

Faced with a choice between exploiting easily obtainable data for righteous ends versus the potential misuse of identifying individuals, can an appropriate balance be struck by privacy legislation? Anderson points out that:

“Because most data privacy laws focus on restricting personally identifiable information (PII), most data privacy laws need to be rethought. And there won’t be any magic bullet; the measures that are taken will increase privacy or reduce the utility of data, but there will be no way to guarantee maximal usefulness and maximal privacy at the same time.”

Looking at the subject from a business perspective, using technologies such as identity resolution to connect non-obvious data relationships serves many initiatives. It would seem admirable to exploit public records and other forms of publicly available information to mitigate risks, uncover fraud, or track down “bad” guys. Yet some cry foul when the technology exposes individuals who didn’t anticipate that their “private” information would be used to identify and/or track them down.

In the rapidly evolving cyber-information age, the desires, conflicts, and limitations of protecting privacy will continue to be sorted out in the legal realm. Those of us who solve business issues using identity resolution technology will swim in this legal quagmire for many years. Finding an appropriate balance between the protection of individual privacy and bona fide business uses of “public” data will almost certainly be a growing challenge to the moral and legal minds of our community.

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

A continual theme at IdentityResolutionDaily is maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of data at all times. Two recent posts concerned fusion centers and citizen profiling, but the same issues apply to virtually any application of entity resolution technology. The fact is that, in some cases, anonymous identity resolution is a requirement for more sensitive identity resolution implementations.

The strong emphasis in data management for the last decade or so has been to implement data warehouses, data marts, and master data management. When bundled with associated processes like data extraction, transformation, and cleansing, these methods have been widely accepted as the best approach to solve any data problem. Here at IdentityResolutionDaily, we tend to talk about this over-handling of data as “data deterioration.”

A more basic approach is simply working with data sources undisturbed in their native environments. New principles suggest that you should perform scoring analyses as close to the source as possible. By exploiting existing security layers already in place, the need to add new layers of security is obviated.

Of course, for key sources of operational data, existing IT policies may deny direct access. In other cases, it may be necessary or preferable to move data for other reasons. For example, achieving desired performance parameters may dictate working with an extracted subset of the data rather than the entire data store.

The point I’m making is not to forbid moving data or creating data marts under any circumstances. Rather, I’m suggesting that the most rational approach is the following:

1. Develop solutions that adapt easily to multiple, disparate, remote data sources.
2. Default to leaving data where it lives whenever and wherever possible.
3. Provide the appropriate levels of entity anonymity within the solution and with the least possible intrusion to the enterprise.

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[Post from Infoglide] Vetting Sharks and Whales

“If you’re not in the casino industry, the title of this post may be meaningless, but for casino managers, “sharks” are the bad guys and “whales” are the good guys. Sharks are people who try to defraud the casino through illegal activities, while whales are the high rollers who are apt to win $20,000 one trip and lost $25,000 the next. If there’s any environment where you’d be motivated as a businessperson to know as much as you can about who you’re dealing with, it’s a casino.”

DATAWARE HOUSING: Business Intelligence and Identity Recognition—IBM’s Entity Analytics

“This article will define master data management (MDM) and explain how customer data integration (CDI) fits within MDM’s framework. Additionally, this article will provide an understanding of how MDM and CDI differ from entity analytics, outline their practical uses, and discuss how organizations can leverage their benefits.”

Workers’Comp Kit Blog: Failure to Pay Workers Compensation Premiums

“A New York asbestos  contractor failed to pay $1.6 Million in workers’ compensation premiums and will serve four years in prison. Upon his release he will be deported to his home country as he is an illegal immigrant… He repeatedly changed the name of his company.”

The TSA Blog: Secure Flight Q&A II

“Each one of these layers alone is capable of stopping a terrorist attack. In combination their security value is multiplied, creating a much stronger, formidable system. A terrorist who has to overcome multiple security layers in order to carry out an attack is more likely to be pre-empted, deterred, or to fail during the attempt.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Data Finds Data in Real-Time Entity Resolution

“Jeff Jonas of IBM recently quoted from a chapter called “Data Finds Data”  that he co-wrote for a book entitled Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions, and I was impressed by how well this passage describes the effective use of entity resolution software (e.g., IRE 2.2)…”

IT-Director.com: GRC is not enough

[Philip Howard]”If you think about these different forms of risk, they can mostly be managed within existing GRC frameworks: business risk, data and IT governance and compliance cover five of these seven types of risk. But they don’t cover fraud or cyber attacks or similar security issues.”

SunSentinel.com: Roofer ducked $400,000 in worker’s comp premiums

“Investigators with the state’s Division of Insurance Fraud said Robert McDonald, owner of Gulfstream Roofing Inc., funneled $3 million in payroll through several fake companies between 2002 and 2006, claiming the money was being paid to insured subcontractors instead of his own workers.”

BNET Healthcare: What Can US Learn From European Health IT Experience?

“The three countries also use universal patient identification numbers in health care. This is much easier to do in Europe than it is in the U.S., where the mistrust of government is so high that the issue of having a single patient identifier number is no longer even under discussion. There’s also the small matter of our low EHR adoption rate, which is less than 20 percent for physicians and lower for hospitals. By contrast, most physicians in the three European countries are using some kind of EHR.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Entity Resolution as Data Mining

“In my last post, I suggested that entity resolution in the broadest sense (“Big ER”) really encompasses three activities.  The first is locating and collecting entity references from unstructured sources (entity extraction), the second is resolving and merging references to the same entity (“Little ER”), and the third is analyzing associations among entities.  Not every ER process involves all three activities.”

BeyeNETWORK: Some Perspectives on Quality

[Bill Inmon] “There are then very legitimate circumstances where incorrect data is best left in the database or data warehouse. Stated differently, there is no circumstance where correcting data or not correcting data is the right thing to do. In order to determine which approach is proper, the context of the corrections has to be known. Only then can it be determined whether correcting errors is the proper thing to do.”

Homeland Security Watch: How To Improve Homeland Security: Give the ODNI Oversight Responsibility for Fusion Centers

“To me, fusion centers are a fine example of Darwinian logic in homeland security.  There was no comprehensive national plan to create fusion centers.  In original intent, Founding-Fathers-federalism fashion, states and cities decided they were not getting the intelligence they wanted.  Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, New York and a handful of other jurisdictions took responsibility for processing - or “fusing” - their own intelligence.”

ITBusinessEdge: Master Data Management and the CIO’s Strategic Plan

“If we look at MDM as a collection of techniques providing enterprise-wide data requirements analysis and subsequent implementation of best practices in data management, then the savvy IT manager might cherry-pick from the tools offered by vendors to provide the optimal solution that unifies the view of critical data concepts while satisfying the data quality requirements imposed by a horizontal information solution.”

I, Cringely: Medical Records R Us

“So medical records are an area where IT could make us healthier and, if done correctly, ought to save lots of money, too.  What we need is some form of centralized medical record keeping that preserves patient privacy yet, at the same time, keeps us from shopping all over town for bogus Oxycontin prescriptions.”

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[Post from Infoglide] iPhones, Identity Resolution, and Cloud Computing

“A personal favorite saying for years has been “invention is the mother of necessity” (a twist on the original saying, of course). It aptly conveys what has driven the high tech industry for the last several decades. Principles like Moore’s Law and its equivalent for the internet have created unanticipated waves of computing and networking power. All that available power has released the combined creativity of tens of thousands of engineers and marketers who dreamed up ways of interacting and managing our lives and businesses that were inconceivable 30 years ago…”

Liliendahl on Data Quality: Match Destinations

“When matching party data – names and addresses – very often it is not just only about hitting similar records, but also about performing some form of transformation with the data before, during and after the hitting.”

Tech Law Notes: Health IT & Open Source

“Repeatedly, I hear the refrain that this stimulus money is going to go to systems that can be put to a “meaningful use,” and that is going to exclude rogue open source Health IT developers from being funded, squelching innovation in the market place.  I imagine that complying with the security regulations under HIPAA probably hinder innovation, too, but they increase the reliability of the system vendors that remain in the market place and reduce the risk to the data of patients that might be in their computer systems.”

The Data Doghouse: People, Process & Politics: Integration Portfolio

“Existing IT projects may be under the label of: Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Master Data Management (MDM), Customer Data Integration (CDI), Product Information Management (PIM), Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI).”

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By the Infoglide Team

e-patients.net: Meaningful Use: The Elephant IS In The Room

“A recent NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows that the American public is surprisingly more positive about the potentials of EHRs than most professionals. People already are familiar with computerized information and accept its risks.”

IT-Director.com: Trends in Master Data Management

“The interesting question is how much pressure this puts on the other MDM players with data quality solutions (like Dataflux and SAP/Business Objects) to build out their data profiling capabilities into the area of data discovery.”

NationalSecurity.org: MYTHBUSTER: TSA’S WATCH LIST IS MORE THAN 1 MILLION PEOPLE STRONG

“There are less than 400,000 individuals on the consolidated terrorist watch list and less than 50,000 individuals on the no-fly and selectee lists. Individuals on the no-fly and selectee lists are identified by law enforcement and intelligence partners as legitimate threats to transportation requiring either additional screening or prohibition from boarding an aircraft.”

OCDQ Blog: TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009

“TDWI World Conference Chicago 2009 was held May 3-8 in Chicago, Illinois at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and was a tremendous success.  I attended as a Data Quality Journalist for the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ). I used Twitter to provide live reporting from the conference.  Here are my notes from the courses I attended…”

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